But what if there’s more than one enemy? What if the enemy we’re “fighting back” at isn’t the one that struck or threatened us? What if the president turns away from the team that was trying to score on us, and he starts heading for another team that’s sitting in the stands, behind our own end zone? What if his “offense” is losing yards with every stride?

In American football, running the ball into the wrong end zone is rare enough to be memorable. In soccer (what most of the rest of the world calls “football”) it’s not nearly as unusual for a team to accidentally deflect the ball into its own net, scoring a goal for the other side. There’s even a technical term for it: it’s called an “own goal.” (In le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl, a car bomber who apparently managed to kill himself and no one else by detonating the bomb early is referred to by a British agent as having “scored an own goal.”)

Whichever game you prefer, making gains for the other team is usually a bad idea. But I suppose thinking that just shows my lack of determination.